Waving the saffron flag

By and large, the US yoga industry does not hide the origins of what it teaches. On the contrary, in a country that is so young and so constantly in flux, yoga’s presumed antiquity (‘the 5,000-year-old exercise system’, etcetera.) and its connections with Eastern spirituality have become part of the sales pitch. Thus, doing namastes, intoning ‘om’ and chanting Sanskrit mantras have become a part of the experience of doing yoga in America.

I’m reminded of Kelly on The Office, dressing up in a sari and piously saying “namaste” when she was applying for a Minority Training Program, which was funny precisely because the rest of the time she’s hyper-American and the opposite of pious.

One would think that yoga’s popularity and Hinduisation would gladden the hearts of Hindu immigrants.

Wrong.

The leading Hindu advocacy organisation in the United States, the aforementioned Hindu American Foundation or HAF, is hardly beaming with pride. On the contrary, it has recently accused the American yoga industry of ‘stealing’—even ‘raping’—yoga by stripping it of its spiritual heritage and not acknowledging its Hindu roots.

17 Responses to “Waving the saffron flag”

Yoga is pretty much Hindu in its origins – just not as ancient, orthodox and brahminical as the saffronists claim it to be. It is as hindu as wushu, gongfu and taiqi are daoist and buddhist. If you are a particular kind of christian or muslim, these origins are enough to warrant an injunction against the practice of yoga (the Malaysian Fatwa Council banned yoga for muslims in 2008).

When I was into yoga – and I joined a gym class rather than a free class at the local temple- some remnants of the religious origins were enough to make me feel a giggly fraud in class.

Well-established practices such as yoga (Indian) tai chi (Chinese) and aikido (Japanese) definitely work in terms of what they set out to do. They all involve the concept of ‘life-énergy’, which in yoga as I recall is ‘pranha’, in tai chi is ‘chi’ and in aikido is ‘ki’. It is possible that all three work even if one does not accept for use this funadamental concept, but in my admittedly limited experience they work best if one does.

Celestial navigation is still an important skill for sailors, because GPS systems have been kinown to break down. Modern celestial navigation is best understood and learnt if one accepts its fundamental practical assumption: that the Earth is the centre of the Universe, and all the stars revolve around it. Astronomers may disagree with that, but their reality just makes celestial navigation far more complicated.

@4: you can improve your standing posture by visualising a golden cord going up from the top of your head into the sky, holding your head up. It’s a really handy visualisation. I often use it. THERE IS NO CORD. There’s all the difference in the world between using a visualisation and actually believing that it’s real; the first is often useful, the second is just misleading. I’ve done kendo to ni-dan grade; ki is sometimes a useful visualisation, but what you actually DO involves armour and swords, not mystical life-forces.

If you start believing that ki is real you’re in danger of ending up like this wanker: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEDaCIDvj6I This “kiai master” apparently totally believed in his mystic arm-waving superpowers, he and his students had this whole thing going on, and he was willing to put money on winning a fight against an MMA guy. It didn’t end happily for him, because his amazing powers are not real and did not protect him from being really punched in the head.

As for celestial navigation, one is not required to believe that the earth really is the centre of the universe in order to use celestial navigation, just as I am not required to believe that the earth is flat in order to use a road map printed on flat paper.

As for celestial navigation, one is not required to believe that the earth really is the centre of the universe in order to use celestial navigation, just as I am not required to believe that the earth is flat in order to use a road map printed on flat paper.

Quite, and I never said otherwise.

The safest and most historically accurate assumption is that all understanding and knowledge is transitional, ie the best we have – at the moment. Religions have pretty flimsy philosophical roots, but the promise offered of eternal life more than compensates for that in the view of many.

Being only able to exert force by contracting (ie pulling) and never by expanding (ie pushing) muscles generally work in pairs. I think that the idea of ki works by ensuring that the paired muscles oppose each others’action to the minimal extent, creating muscular harmony and flow of movement rather than stop-start jerkiness.

I am not a celestial navigator, but I use ki all the time.

Koichi Tohei’s Aikido in Daily Life is excellent. And well reviewed at Amazon. See the link below.

I would suggest that you do not use ki at all, nor does anybody else, but you use the idea of ki all the time.

Lol. I got in trouble for suggesting something similar to that, at least in concept, when I was still doing karate. That this whole ‘ki’ thing wasn’t so much ‘magical oriental-accessed-spiritual-energy’ but was, rather, more of a combination of anxiety reduction and focus on the task at hand that allowed you to perform close to your best, versus, not so well…

I wish *all* yoga instructors would take the grievance extremely seriously. I’d really like to be able to start a yoga class without having to worry how much time we’re going to waste on “spiritual stories” and how much the instructor will hate me because I refuse to say namaste at the end of class.

I would suggest that you do not use ki at all, nor does anybody else, but you use the idea of ki all the time.

Ki as an idea; ki as life energy. I don’t give a damn as long as it works. I find that the best way to ‘use the idea’ is to adopt it – for the purpose. You can’t use it unless you get inside of it; as in the case of geocentrism and celestial navigation.

. I find that the best way to ‘use the idea’ is to adopt it – for the purpose.

I don’t necessarily disagree with this, but there is a danger here, and I think is what the other commenters are responding to. Far too many people will use the “I just use what works” line when confronted by those who are skeptical, but will slip into much more literal language — and perhaps even literal belief — when not. There’s something two-faced about that, and potentially dangerous to critical thinking.

The time has come for me to come out on this site. I am a (skeptical) Yoga instructor. I specialize in the instruction of adult beginners and the elderly. My youngest student is 62.

Tea, you would like my class if you were old enough to take it. I don’t teach any of that spiritual stuff. It was a standing joke at the studio where I studied for years that I was always late to class. I didn’t tell them that my lateness was a deliberate ploy to avoid the chanting and the homilies that began the class. I was always there in time for the first pose. One of the reasons I am no longer affiliated with the Anusara organization is that I don’t want to interweave Tantric philosophy into my lesson plan. (For the record, I have a high regard for Anusara technique and I do use the principles of alignment in my own practice and teaching. The rest of it can bite my Kundalini).

If you are interested in a scholarly study of the origins of modern Yoga, I would direct you to Mark Singleton’s excellent Yoga Body: the Origins of Modern Posture Practice in paperback from Oxford Univ. Press. Allow me to quote from the back cover:

Singleton’s surprising and surely controversial thesis is that yoga as popularly practiced today owes a greater debt to modern Indian nationalism and , even more surprisingly, to the spiritual aspirations of European bodybuilding and early 20th-century women’s gymnastic movements of Europe and America, than it does to any ancient Indian yoga tradition.

I would also direct you to the work of Joseph Alter on historicising yoga. I suspect Hindutva will be unhappy with it.

@10: I can absolutely use ideas (e.g. the golden cord visualisation) without being confused for a moment over whether they’re real. Do you find this difficult? Why?

I still don’t see why doing celestial navigation requires you to believe in geocentrism; it only requires you to use a coordinate system. The map is not the territory, and the use of an earth-centred coordinate system is not an assertion that the earth is the centre of everything.

I don’t necessarily disagree with this, but there is a danger here, and I think is what the other commenters are responding to. Far too many people will use the “I just use what works” line when confronted by those who are skeptical, but will slip into much more literal language — and perhaps even literal belief — when not. There’s something two-faced about that, and potentially dangerous to critical thinking.

“I don’t necessarily disagree … but … danger. Far too many people will use the “I just use what works” line when confronted by those who are skeptical, but will slip into much more literal language — and perhaps even literal belief — when not. There’s something two-faced about that, and potentially dangerous to critical thinking.”

But I take it that after all that you still don’t “necessarily disagree”.

I only use celestial navigationa as an analogy. Yoga is a series of postures to be relaxed into, and I personally have never found it necessary to conceptualise any further in order to gain benefit from it. But aikido is dynamic and very fast-moving. Moreover, intellectualising while doing definitely gets in the way, because it is not, I repeat not, an intellectual excercise. One can talk about it, as I am doing now, while not doing it. But it is best done in my experience with an empty and undistracted mind, and its leading practitioners and instructors stress that. That is what I mean by getting inside it.

In order to do that, one does not have to abandon the Enlightenment, acknowledge the Pope as infallible, or engage in any sort of devil worship.

Is the mind during aikido sufficiently empty and undistracted that it’s not cluttered up with ideas about “ki”?

During both fencing and kendo, and even during ballroom dancing, I’ve had that experience of “flow”- everything works smoothly and there’s a considerable suppression of the sense of self; rather as though the resources that the mind usually devotes to modelling the self are instead being used entirely for the task in hand. Afterwards there’s almost a waking-up sensation. It’s an amazing and profound experience on the rare occasions that it actually happens for me :)

There’s still no such thing as “ki”, nor does one ever have to believe that there is.

I think what James is pointing at is that an awful lot of people use a broken syllogism which takes them from “Praying is good for me” to “the god I’m praying to exists”; hence our hypersensitivity to the slippery slope from “the idea of ki is useful to me” to “ki is real”.

During both fencing and kendo, and even during ballroom dancing, I’ve had that experience of “flow”- everything works smoothly and there’s a considerable suppression of the sense of self; rather as though the resources that the mind usually devotes to modelling the self are instead being used entirely for the task in hand

Muscle movement and coordination are highly developed in higher animals, even those with minimal ‘intelligence’. Consider a squirrel jumping from branch to branch, orienting its body in space. The brain mechanisms that control these things are very very old. Humans have added intelligence and logic on top of such mechanisms, but the logical mind is far too slow and cumbersome to coordinate all those muscles while actually ‘thinking’ about what it is doing at any level of detail.

Our conscious mind does what it does best, determines what we are to learn to do, and crudely takes our older animal brain through the motions until that brain has all the pathways and reflexes developed. At that point the best thing the conscious mind can do is step back and disengage. Let our ancient muscular coordination system do what it has evolved to do over so many hundreds of millions of years.

When athletes play a great game, this detachment is essential. There is nothing magic, but the last thing the well conditioned animal brain needs is micromanagement from the clunky logical brain that overlays it.

…There is nothing magic, but the last thing the well conditioned animal brain needs is micromanagement from the clunky logical brain that overlays it.

I would agree with you there. A flustered person is one who has started acting without reaching a final decision on what to do, so favours first one course, then something else a few moments later: the very opposite of one with an inner calm.

A yoga teacher I met once introduced me to the idea that our lives consist of four aspects: physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual – the latter term being used not in the usual religious sense, but in terms of zest for living and outgoingness. I have found this to be quite valuable. It is important in human development, as all four aspects must be brought out together and kept in balance if the best health is to be achieved: physical and intellectual activity, emotional expression (as found say, through artistic activity) and alertness and joy in living are the keys to it. IMHO.

Many yogis are religious one way or another. At the same time, and I may be wrong, yogis have not so far produced a single suicide bomber, mass murderer or perpetrator of some or other atrocity. There are none so dangerous IMHO as those who are spiritually dead: finding little or no joy in their own lives, and wishing to remove as much as they can of it from the rest of the world.

Adolf Hitler dies a Catholic, and Stalin was an Orthodox Christian turned atheist, but became in his time the pope of a new world religion. Gods do not protect us. We protect ourselves.